A couple weeks ago Jared and I made a dance video for ZANZIBAR! And there it is.

And somehow, magically, a bunch of lovely people are giving us a total of almost $160 per music video we make on our Patreon page. This is just huge. I mean, this is a significant amount of money for us and I just can’t even believe that this Patreon thing is working. Just know this…there was lots of happy crying happening last week when I realized that this number, $159.11, wasn’t a big mistake and that I can relax at least a little bit about paying rent within the next couple days. Oh, and spend my time on this blog post, and editing another video, rather than applying for a job at a coffeeshop, as a friend urged me to do last week (which I was considering doing for the course of an evening).

And now I must get back to work editing what is my favorite Happy Gland video we’ve made so far. But not before I pet this cat.

We’re happy to play this show
But sad to see Melinda go
And Brennen Leigh and Noel McKay
Shall sing before they’re on their way
Back to Nashville, back out East
Where Melinda shall put roots down, deep
(I mean she’s moving to Wisconsin or Minnesota or something, not Nashville)
The Happy Gland Band will play too
And we’ll drink lots of coffee, too
At Napoli, that lovely place
Our three duos shall melt your face.

We’re entering a contest! It’s this contest. It’s a contest where you make a video (hey, we do that) of you playing music (hey, we do that, too) with a desk nearby (hey, we have a desk), and maybe you get to play at the NPR Music offices in Washington sometime. So we did the things they asked us to do and now we’ve made another video!

For this contest, as you can see, we made a video for a song that I wrote called The Clever Wife. It’s about the wonders of being a 1950s housewife.

ALSO, this is our FIRST PATRON-FUNDED video! Hooray! Since we launched our Patreon page, a coupla’ really lovely ladies actually decided to take money out of their own wallets or pants or PayPals or whathaveyou and…gave it to us! What’s more, they’ve promised to give us money every time we make a video. (And boy, oh boy, have we got some plans.) Well, all we have to say is…thank you!

We just launched our Patreon page! What’s that, you say? Patronage died out nearly hundreds of years ago? Yes, well we thought so too. Turns out there’s a website out there trying to bring the patron/artist relationship back. If you’d like to help us in our wacky quest to make fun music and silly videos, this is one way you can do that.

Here’s the low-down:

We make videos. We upload them to YouTube for free. We love doing this. With Patreon, we’re trying to make this more of a money-making venture. We’re asking you to pledge an amount of money—$1, 2$, any amount you’re comfortable with—per video we release.

We made this short video to help explain what the deal is. (Warning: it contains a unhealthy amount of dog tongue—but we think it’s really funny, anyway.)

And there’s stuff in it for you, too! We’ve got rewards set up for different levels of patronage, including mp3 downloads and ukulele tutorials. More info is on our Patreon page!

AHHH we can’t tell you how excited we are about this! Best to you and yours and we hope you’re having a super spectacular extra-fandangled New Year!

It’s the truth. That person who collects vintage kazoos in all keys, has every electronic gadget, and ten mewling cats to boot, probably does not have (and doesn’t even realize she needs) an anatomically correct model of the Happy Gland.

Avoid buying crap from evil corporate entities!

Rather than going all corporate this holiday season, check out some fine goods that Jared and I made ourselves.Everything that we sell at the Happy Gland Band online storewas handmade with love (starting with our music).

It’s amazing. I made it this morning while waiting for a Jared Putnam creation (a delicious fritatta-quiche thing) to bake. I think it might be the most delicious thing I’ve ever made. It is definitely the most delicious thing I’ve eaten today. (It’s the only thing I’ve eaten today, so far.) Because I love you, I want to share with you my recipe, or as I like to call it, a list-of-ingredients-with-rather-vague-quantities-followed-by-general-instructions.

It’s based on this delicious sauce, which has only one drawback: the tiny containers in which it is sold. I could destroy one of those little tubs in approximately 2.3 seconds and feel immediate remorse. When I make it by the barrelful I can devour as much as I want (it’s fine, it’s really healthy and stuff, it’s VEGAN and even maybe mostly raw) and not feel regretful, as I would, staring at the bottom of a tiny plastic container.

The Most Delicious Sauce (Dip) In The Whole Wide World

an amount—maybe 1 cup or more—of raw almonds, soaked in water for at least a few hours or overnight (or, in my case, days and days in the refrigerator)

a bit—maybe 1/3 cup— of nutritional yeast (less than the almonds but more than anything else, volume-wise)

a bit of water

a coupla cloves of garlic

juice of one lemon

a glug or three of olive oil

three or four glugs of Bragg’s Liquid Aminos (which you can get online here)

Plop everything in a food processor. Run it, for like, a long time. Make it all smooth and stuff. Add enough water to make it just a little too runny, because it’ll stiffen up a bit as it sits. The texture gets better (smoother) after a few hours, or overnight, if you can wait that long. Not that we can seem to.

Brave—that’s the same word we use to describe people who run into burning buildings to save baskets of kittens or a perhaps a half-eaten sleeve of Oreos.

Me? I’m just a girl who had her boyfriend take a dog grooming kit to her head, for totally selfish reasons (no charity-drive head-shave motivations here, unfortunately)—I had previously given myself a shitty haircut.

I’ve gotten a variety of reactions—there are the folks who seem to think I might have cancer (“You look like you have cancer!”) or that someone close to me might have cancer. Then there are the (admittedly drunken, filterless) people who are totally, viscerally, loudly perplexed. (“Why did you do that?!?”) And there have been a lot of people who just took a long while to recognize me. There are also people who seem totally unfazed, and even those who have complimented me on the way it looks, without preamble. (“I love your shaved head. You look great.”) I like this type of reaction best, for obvious reasons.

But I’ve also I’ve gotten a lot of: “You’re so brave!”

I want to talk about this because I’ve heard this fairly often, since I first cut my hair cut short as a teenager.

Why? Why is it considered brave for a woman to have short hair? WHY? This is so utterly perplexing to me. Hair is this strange evolutionary phenomenon—many thousands of tiny strands of body parts that are dead, but still attached to you—to which we have apparently assigned a great deal of importance.

It clearly has something to do with gender. Do we call men with shaved heads “brave”? Do we automatically assume men with shaved heads are battling cancer? Do people notice a man’s shaved head the way they’d notice a woman’s? (Related question: how do people notice women’s clothing versus men’s clothing?)

Why does it mean that a woman with short hair might be a lesbian, or a feminist (hey, that’s me!), or ill, or perhaps, if you were photographed on the streets of NYC, exceedingly fashionable?

Why must we acknowledge a short-haired woman in the way that we do? Why must we acknowledge short hair at all? Why can’t it just mean that she (me) had cut her hair, didn’t like the way it looked, and wanted to start over?

Why does it mean I was brave?

Bullshit. I may be brave for some things (riding a bicycle? growing kale? driving at any time on any street, given the rate at which people die doing such things?), but cutting my goddamn hair is not an act of bravery. It is an act of vanity and to call it bravery cheapens the word.

Or does it?

Being brave enough to cut your hair short reveals something telling about the culture we live in. It is, apparently, a world in which a woman with short hair has committed an almost revolutionary act. Gasp!—this one is different than what we’d expected! This one doesn’t follow the template! Might she have some kind of social or political agenda? Maybe she is strange, maybe wonderful, badass, free, empowered. Maybe she is fresh, sexy, full of energy and vitality, totally fucking rad.

Dude—gender. Why are these things so contorted and strange? Why must we humans make things so hard on ourselves?

“Jared Putnam,” I said above the comforting sound of an ancient whirring motor, “look at how technology is improving our lives!”

No longer would I spend hours sweating over a cold hand-crank ice cream maker. No, no longer! Life is a breeze now thanks to our brand-new Procter-Silex ice cream maker from the 1960s that we got at a thrift store for six dollars—we paid approximately one dollar per decade that it’s been around.

It also came with sexist racist heteronormative manual, I mean, recipe booklet.

Proctor Silex: Where only the white kids have fun at 1960s barbeques.

Proctor Silex electric ice cream makers: helping heteronormative white folks get it on since the 1960s!

Now, my friends, I feel pride in what I have done here today. I have experimented with creating a recipe for coffee ice cream, and, BY JOVE, I like the results! The recipe below is a mashup of this gelato recipe from Epicurious and a recipe I found in La Cucina in which a recipe for coffee ice cream advises you to use 8 CUPS OF HEAVY CREAM and 2/3 cup coffee grounds. This seemed like someting I would want to avoid not necessarily because of the caloric value of 8 cups of heavy cream (I SPURN HEALTH FOODS!) but aghh the dread mouthfeel of 8 cups of frozen heavy cream! I also found a bunch of recipes that I did not want to follow as they called for as much as 1 1/2 cups whole coffee beans, which just seems so wasteful to me. You’re ignoring the entire middle of the bean! Dude, just grind that shit up and let the coffee joy happen!

So here it is, an extremely simple recipe for coffee ice cream. It’s a custardy-type of thing, and the best kind of ice cream I’ve ever made in my whole grown-up life!

Coffee Ice Cream Recipe

Boil milk and cream together, stirring every once in a while in a vain attempt to keep a skin from forming on the top. A skin will form on the top. Stir it in, whatever. You’ll strain it later. Once the milk boils (at around 205 degrees, the perfect temperature for brewing coffee!) add the coffee. Stir it all in. Let it steep for a while—I let mine sit around for about 15 minutes.

Have a bowl, a fine mesh strainer, and some cheesecloth ready to pour your coffeemilk into. It will take a long ass freaking time for your coffeemilk to strain through the cheesecloth if you have a small strainer like I do, and it will seem like your coffee-steeping time will increase to, like, 25 minutes. Whatevs. It’s all cool. Press as much coffeemilk out of your cheesecloth as possible and toss your coffee grounds into the compost, because that shit is gold. Also, it’s worth noting that at this time you’ll probably be frustrated to realize that fresh skins are forming atop your now grounds-free coffeemilk. Balls! But fret not, because we’ll just strain it again anyway.

Now you’ll bring your coffeemilk, on med-low heat, up to the correct custard-making temperature, 175 degrees. Stir often. Curse the skins! At the same time (if you’re alright at multi-tasking) separate your egg yolks out and whisk them in a nice big bowl. Add the sugar and beat. Beat it hard. It should be really pretty, a light yellow. When your coffeemilk is at 175 degrees, remove it from heat and, whisking constantly, whisk a bit of the coffeemilk into the sugaryolks at a time, tempering the eggs.

Have a clean bowl and fine mesh strainer ready.

When your coffeemilk and sugaryolks are mixed together, return it to the pan and, stirring constantly over med-low heat, bring it all up to 185 degrees. Remove from heat! Immediately! Don’t wait, or disaster will strike upon your poor yolks, curdling them! Strain it into that bowl! Goodbye milkskins! We shan’t meet again!

You can now do the appropriate anti-custardskin measures, like pressing plastic wrap (or a humiliated freezer bag, in my case) against the custard. You can also make it cool all quick-like if’n you wanna by putting the custard bowl into a larger vessel and filling that larger vessel with ice and cold water and such. You know the tricks.

Now freeze into ice cream using your preferred method of freezing into ice cream! I used the approved 1960s Proctor Silex method of electrical ice cream maker freezing, which looks something like this.